Edouard Manet is probably more original in form than in substance. He announced some techniques quite characteristic of the aesthetics of modern art.

Already with Fragonard (1732-1806), with the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), and with the English painters Gainsborough (1727-1788), Constable (1776-1837), Turner (1775-1851), the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century had multiplied processes that become frequent, even systematic, with Modern Art:

The Sketch, raised to the dignity of the finished picture.

The decomposition of light and color. Tachism (impressionism, pointillism ....).

Manet practice these two techniques, but it is still more original when he reinvents the Flat Paint.

The Flat Paint, is a new aesthetic that meets a great success during the 19th century and early 20th.

The Flat Paint is defined very simply: it eliminates or reduces the perspective and volumes. This technique favors the lines, the surfaces, rather than the depth and the volumes. The table painted finds her two dimensions, and the painted subject must comply with the flatness of the support.

In Italy: Massimo Campigli (1895-1971) and Modigliani (1884-1920), a Neo-Byzantine!

Indeed, The Flat Paint, in two dimensions, is not a new technique.

The whole painting Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic in its early days, late Gothic International said, belong to this unrealistic aesthetic.

The Modern painters travel in the opposite direction, the path that had taken the painters of the Gothic and of the "Renaissance." They abandon the realism of the drawing and colors. The Modern painters are leaving the naturalism that characterized all European painting since the ending gothic, and the renaissance.

Manet and his successors return to an idealistic interpretation, symbolic, suggestive of the world that surrounds them. They return to the aesthetics of Giotto and Romanesque frescoes.

At the end of this road, the European painting will result in the abstract art, non-figurative.

Indeed, from simplifications until synthesis, from suggestions until interpretations, painters always move more away of a naturalistic and realistic representation of reality, and eventually leave the real.

The villages and churches of Lyonel Feininger are almost no longer as intersecting lines.

All paintings of Manet presented here belong to the aesthetics of the Flat Paint. Only for portraits Manet remains realistic.